Curated playlist
American computer scientists
- Paul WerbosPaul Werbos completed a doctoral dissertation in 1974 that contained the first formal description of training artificial neural networks through backpropagation of errors. For years, the work attracted little attention. He was not a…
- John SchulmanJohn Schulman was in seventh grade when he became fixated on BattleBots. The television program featured combat between remote-controlled robots, and it set off what he described as his first experience of self-directed learning. He read…
- Vernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge spent decades asking one question that made both scientists and storytellers uncomfortable: what happens when machines become smarter than the people who built them? Born on the 2nd of October 1944, Vinge was a…
- Jon KleinbergJon Kleinberg grew up in a household where mathematics and computing were simply the texture of daily life. His father Eugene was a mathematics professor at SUNY Buffalo. His mother Evelyn was a computer science researcher. Even his…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed. He was born in Budapest in 1903 and died at age 53 in 1957, and in those years he…
- Nick SzaboNick Szabo looked at the Internet in the early 1990s and saw a fundamental problem: strangers doing business with each other had no reliable way to enforce agreements. Szabo, an American computer scientist and legal scholar, decided that…
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky once described intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. That idea alone reshaped how scientists and engineers think about minds, both human and machine. But the man who proposed it was…
- Arthur Samuel (computer scientist)Arthur Lee Samuel coined the term "machine learning" in 1959, and the computers of his era had almost no memory to spare. Working at IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, Samuel faced a problem that would define the rest of the century: how do…
- Daniel HuttenlocherDaniel Huttenlocher holds 24 patents in computer vision, a total reached by 2015 after decades of research. Yet his most widely read work carries two other names alongside his own. One is Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State. The…
- Terry WinogradTerry Allen Winograd was born on the 24th of February 1946, and he would go on to become one of computing's most quietly influential figures. He is a professor at Stanford University, co-director of the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction…
- David ChaumDavid Lee Chaum, born in 1955, sketched the blueprint for digital privacy long before most people had an email address. In 1982, the same year he finished his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, he submitted a dissertation…
- Edward FredkinEdward Fredkin bought chemistry supplies at age 10, made his own fireworks in Los Angeles, and got in trouble because fireworks were illegal. That detail captures something essential about the man. He was constitutionally incapable of…
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956, and spent the rest of his life trying to build exactly what that phrase promised. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 4th of September 1927, to an Irish…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and philosopher, born in Tel Aviv on the 4th of September, 1936. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery gave Pearl the Turing Award, computing's highest…
- Grace HopperGrace Hopper hung a clock on her office wall that ran counterclockwise, ticking backward through every meeting. "Humans are allergic to change," she once said. "They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's…